IT IS A SIGN OF HOW MUCH IRELAND HAS CHANGED over recent decades that a declaration that someone had a deep faith can have such an uncomfortable subtext. Since the 1990s, the Catholic Church in Ireland has been rocked by a series of scandals. Whereas the church was once the bedrock of Irish life, it is now floundering at the margins. In 1980, 96 per cent of all weddings were Catholic; in 2018, it was 47 per cent. Of course, that reflects a changing, more multicultural society, but Ireland is now a very different country from the one in which Peter Sutherland grew up. His faith, nevertheless, was very important to him.
Gonzaga and Fr Joe Veale were important factors in shaping Sutherland’s value system, but there were others. According to Diarmuid Martin, the archbishop of Dublin, Sutherland and his contemporaries would have been heavily influenced by changes in the church itself in the early 1960s: ‘At the time of the Second Vatican Council there was a reflection of the church’s role in the world. And this was a reflection of a change in the geography of the world. It was the 1960s and a time of decolonisation. There was a belief that we needed to assist these countries to develop. Peter’s vision of migration comes from the same thing. Movement is a natural corollary to globalisation. Migration means enrichment of societies.’
Martin and Sutherland encountered one another for the first time in the small village of Cernobbio, on Lake Como in Italy, in the early 1990s, where Archbishop Martin was representing the Vatican at an international financial conference. The two afterwards met a number of times at Davos, and over the years they got to know each other. Martin returned to Ireland in 2004 as archbishop of Dublin, and he recalls of Sutherland: ‘He came to my residence on a number of occasions to talk about the church and the financial aspects of the church and migration. He was very generous to church organisations. He didn’t just dole money out. He came to me to talk about particular projects and I would tell him if I couldn’t recommend that he do it.’ If so, that was usually the end of it.
Archbishop Martin tells of an acquaintance who was a high-ranking IMF official. ‘He was Chilean and he was educated at a Jesuit university. He studied a subject called Catholic sociology. There is no such thing as Catholic sociology. They were basically sent out to poorer parts of the city to help people. That also shaped Peter. I think Peter got from the Jesuits the ability to understand inter-relations. You could see that from the WTO, the ability to introduce a rules-based system and how that would be a positive development for the developing world.’
Sutherland’s faith was expressed in many ways, but particularly through his generosity. Although Hywel Jones still regrets that Sutherland did not set up a foundation with his windfall from Goldman Sachs’ flotation, close associates of Sutherland say that he was very generous with his money; but his donations were made privately. How much he gave to charitable causes is unknown, but it is likely to run into tens of millions.
In 2007, Dáithí Ó Ceallaigh was the Irish ambassador to Britain when Irish President Mary McAleese gave a lecture at Westminster Abbey. He organised a dinner for McAleese at the Irish embassy after the event, for which she requested that an invitation be extended to Annie Maguire, the victim of one of the gravest miscarriages of justice in British judicial history. In 1975 the Maguire family had been arrested as part of the investigation into a 1974 bombing in the Surrey town of Guildford. Paul Hill, Gerry Conlon, Paddy Armstrong and Carole Richardson were wrongly convicted of being IRA members who planted the bombs, while the Maguires were convicted in 1976 of handling explosives. The convictions were eventually quashed in 1991 following an appeal which found that the case against them had been manufactured.
There were roughly 100 people at the dinner, and Ó Ceallaigh put Maguire at the same table as McAleese and Sutherland. When Sutherland and Maguire fell into a lengthy conversation, she told him that her youngest son Patrick, who was fourteen at the time of his incarceration, had developed mental health issues and would need treatment for the rest of his life. ‘Peter made arrangements to cover the bill,’ says Ó Ceallaigh.
Ó Ceallaigh had spent three years on a mission station in Zambia before he entered the diplomatic corps. Andrew Turnbull, the former UK Cabinet Secretary, who had himself spent a number of years in Zambia, set up a small charity to educate orphans in the country when he retired in 2005, and asked Ó Ceallaigh if he would launch it. The launch took place in the embassy, and Ó Ceallaigh invited Sutherland to attend. ‘I then discovered that he was already financially supporting a hospital in Zambia. He couldn’t come but he sent Garrett Sheehan instead. He was helping people all over the place but he never talked about it.’
One act of Sutherland’s generosity was revealed by the Sunday Times in 2012 through the workings of the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA). Seán MacRéamoinn, a well-known Irish-language journalist and broadcaster, had fallen ill in 2006 and was struggling financially. At the time two businessmen had stepped in to help by buying his family home, putting in place a confidential agreement that MacRéamoinn be allowed to live there until his death. The men had learnt of MacRéamoinn’s financial difficulties from contacts in Fine Gael and paid the market value for the former broadcaster’s home in Eden Park Drive in Goatstown, south Dublin, taking out a mortgage with the Anglo Irish Bank. The names of the two businessmen were never known to MacRéamoinn; but one was Pat Doherty, who created the Titanic Quarter in Belfast. The other was Peter Sutherland.
Four years later, when NAMA moved in on Doherty’s Harcourt Developments, the loan for MacRéamoinn’s former home was also swept into the agency. When, according to the Sunday Times report, Sutherland became aware that a loan partly in his name was under NAMA’s control, he agreed to buy out Doherty’s share, and NAMA then released its hold on the mortgage. Sutherland then rented out the property. Neither Sutherland nor Doherty were close to MacRéamoinn; they were simply approached because they were in a position to help.
Sutherland was immensely proud of University College Dublin, which he supported continuously over the years. Education was one of his great interests. He believed that Ireland needed a world-class education system if it was going to compete in the global economy, But his interest in education didn’t stem entirely from economic considerations. He believed that a well-resourced and accessible education system was one of the best ways of tackling inequality.
Sutherland had studied law at UCD when the campus was located in Earlsfort Terrace. The college moved to its current Belfield site in Dublin 4 in the 1970s, and the law faculty was housed in the Roebuck Building, which by the early 2000s was no longer suitable. Hugh Brady, UCD’s president, put together a committee made up of prominent barristers and major law firms in Dublin, and chaired by Declan McCourt, to consider the future of the school. The cost of a new school was estimated at €27 million. Mary Hanafin, education minister at the time, agreed in 2007 to put up one-third of the final cost, with the agreement that the rest would have to come from donations.
‘I asked Peter would he be lead donor. In principle he said he would. He was also asked would he fund a chair in European law.’ Imelda Maher was identified as a suitable candidate, and she came back from the London School of Economics to take the position. Sutherland, says McCourt, was very reluctant to have his name associated with the project at the beginning, and only agreed when he was sure that it was what everybody wanted. ‘He put together a multi-million euro package for the building and the chair. The Sutherland School of Law is one of the most modern law buildings in the world,’ concludes McCourt.
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In 2001, Sutherland had become chairman of the Ireland Funds in the UK. Basil Geoghegan, who was on the board at the time, says that Sutherland wanted the fund to have a clear identity and practical focus like the Ireland Funds in the US, which had become a prominent player in the peace process in Northern Ireland. Sutherland came up with the idea of the Forgotten Irish after visiting a shelter in Camden Town in north London, largely occupied by Irishmen who had emigrated in the 1950s and 1960s. They could no longer work, but had no homes and nowhere to go, and many had mental health issues or problems with alcohol. That, says Geoghegan, would not have prevented Sutherland from offering help: ‘He was in no way judgemental.’
In 2007 the Ireland Fund commissioned research from Middlesex University in order to identify, locate and quantify the numbers of vulnerable and elderly Irish in the UK. The ‘Forgotten Irish’ Report was the first such study to be conducted on a UK-wide basis, focusing on the fifty-plus age bracket, although it included a caveat: due to its very nature the statistics were likely to under-represent the size of the ‘Forgotten Irish’ community in England, as such figures could not include Irish people who were homeless or who did not access state provisions or services.
The report found that most of the ‘Forgotten Irish’ had come to Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. The majority came to find work and sent billions of pounds home to their families, while thousands of others came to escape the hardship, the marginalisation and, all too often, the abuse of institutional life. They paved the way for more recent generations of Irish immigrants to Britain. At the end of their working lives, many lacked the means to go home, however; often they were living in isolation, poverty and deprivation, without the support of friends or family.
The key findings of the report were that the largest concentrations of older Irish migrants were in areas such as Yorkshire and Humberside and the West Midlands. Census figures showed that a high proportion of Irish lived in the UK’s most deprived boroughs and local government areas. Some regions, such as south-west England and East Anglia, had low Irish populations, but among those were a high proportion of elderly Irish. There were few if any Irish community groups or centres in these areas. Almost 20 per cent of Irish pensioners in the UK lived alone. More than 10 per cent of the Irish population in the UK – some 67,000 people – were not working because of permanent sickness or disability, while Irish men were 15 per cent more likely than their British counterparts to be single, divorced, separated or widowed from the age of fifty onwards. Deaths from cancer among Irish people in Britain was 20 per cent higher than the national average.
Sutherland headed the campaign, and tried, according to Dáithí Ó Ceallaigh, to involve the big Irish property developers in the UK with the Ireland Fund and the campaign. ‘He had some success with them, but not as much as he would have liked.’
It is understood that Sutherland contributed generously to the campaign from his own resources. But Hugo MacNeill says it wasn’t just about money, and that Sutherland was also very generous with his time. He recalls a night in London when he went for a drink with Sutherland and another colleague after an Ireland Funds board meeting. ‘He left for quite some time. I thought something must have happened. It turned out he had to deal with three people who had got into terrible difficulty in their personal lives. I’ll never forget that. This was about eleven at night. He was very apologetic about leaving us for so long. This wasn’t about finance. It was a very difficult position that one person in particular had found himself in. Nobody would have known about this. It was never about grand gestures with Peter. He did it all behind the scenes. There was nothing for him apart from his own satisfaction.’
The death of Brian Murphy, an eighteen-year-old student, outside the Anabel nightclub in Dublin in August 2000 gripped the country for much of the decade. Four students from Blackrock College – Dermot Laide, Sean Mackay, Desmond Ryan and Andrew Frame – were charged with manslaughter and violent disorder. All charges against Frame were dropped, but Mackay and Ryan were convicted of violent disorder, although Ryan’s conviction was overturned on appeal. Laide was convicted of manslaughter and violent disorder and sent to prison; his conviction for manslaughter was overturned in 2005 following an appeal. Sutherland did not know Laide, nor did they have any mutual acquaintances. Nevertheless, Sutherland made contact with him. ‘He thought Laide had been hard done by. The other three boys came from establishment families in Dublin, whereas Laide was from Monaghan. He was having a very hard time of it when he got out of prison and Suds believed he deserved a second chance,’ says a close friend of Sutherland’s. Sutherland introduced Laide to a number of people to help him build a life. He is now an undertaker in the Blackrock district of Dublin.
Sutherland had played a few times against Gordon Wood when the former Irish international was coming to the end of his rugby career. After Wood died tragically young at the age of fifty-one in 1982,his son Keith became one of the best hookers in the history of the game, playing with the same intensity and determination as his father. When Keith Wood retired after the 2003 Rugby World Cup, Sutherland – knowing that the transition back to normal civilian life is difficult for many players – rang him, although they had never met, and offered him advice and support. The two men subsequently became good friends.
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Even though faith was an important part of Sutherland’s life, his first formal role with the Catholic Church came about only in 2011, when he became an adviser to the Vatican’s Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See. ‘There were a number of good financial people on the board. It was Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor with whom he was very close.’ It was the former archbishop of Westminster, says Archbishop Martin, who proposed Sutherland to the Vatican.
However, adds Martin, Sutherland was unhappy that the system was not transparent. The Vatican has been embroiled in financial scandals over much of its existence, and in the early 1980s it had played a cameo role in one of the most notorious murders in Italy. Roberto Calvi, who among other roles had been the Vatican’s banker, was found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London in June 1982 in an apparent suicide. It took until the mid-1990s to prove that he had been murdered by the mafia as a result of certain murky dealings. By the start of the noughties the Vatican Bank had been engulfed in accusations of money laundering and fraud.
Sutherland was a member of a panel of consultors, who met once or twice a year and were available to be contacted individually for advice. But they were advisers rather than a policy board, and like any group of advisers their advice might or might not be taken. Sutherland told colleagues at Goldman Sachs that, one year when he was attending the annual meeting of his board, he reviewed the financial advice he had given the previous year to find that the markets had gone in the opposite direction. An envelope slipped under the door of his room at the Vatican hotel contained the minutes of the previous year’s meeting, changed to make it look as if his advice had been correct. ‘They must have been trying to spare my feelings,’ he told colleagues.
Sutherland’s panel reported to the board of clerics. ‘This board was comprised of cardinals but their knowledge of financial markets and investments was patchy,’ says Archbishop Martin, who adds that Sutherland found this frustrating. ‘He didn’t feel as if it was being run effectively or efficiently. When Pope Francis was appointed in 2013 he set about a radical reform of the Vatican’s finances. The board of advisers that Peter was a member of was sidelined.’
When Pope Francis summoned Sutherland to the Vatican in 2013, asking for advice on the reforms necessary to safeguard the reputation of the Vatican Bank in future, Sutherland emphasised the need for transparency. So Pope Francis created the new role of Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy to oversee the required reforms. There was speculation at the time that Sutherland was interested in the position, although Archbishop Martin says he does not know whether there was any truth in the rumour. In any case, in 2014, Pope Francis appointed Cardinal George Pell to the post. (In 2019, Pell was convicted on charges of child sex offences committed in Australia in the 1990s, and sentenced to six years in prison.)
Archbishop Martin had extensive discussions with Sutherland about the church. ‘He was liberal in his faith and he was unashamed of that. He felt the Irish church had become fossilised a little bit. He was known for his generosity to Catholic institutions and he would have been courted by them. I never asked him for anything.’
Criticisms were often made that there was an inconsistency between Sutherland’s faith and his business career. ‘I’ve no idea how he made so much money,’ says Archbishop Martin, who notes that many of Sutherland’s colleagues went from Goldman Sachs back into government. Oil, he observes, is a controversial business. ‘If I was going to canonise Peter I would look into the files of what practices his businesses got up to. For example, take a country like Angola. Oil hinders its development. I don’t know about his personal role in it. You would have to get out your diary and match the times. He could have been one of the few who understood the mitigating circumstances. I don’t know enough about his roles. I don’t know enough about his private work and whether BP and Goldman Sachs lived up to the ideals of inter-relations at a global level.’
Fr Barber would address these contradictions at Sutherland’s funeral mass:
One never finds greatness in gaining credit of a great name on earth, but in conforming one’s life to that of Christ. If one achieves that then one is great, no matter how the life is otherwise. This was something of which Peter Sutherland was quietly convinced and that he accepted in faith. This may seem strange to say of one who had Peter’s ambition, wealth, prestige and power in high places. Yet it was his faith and the practice of his faith that gave him his moral compass.[1]
Fr Barber paid tribute to Sutherland’s philanthropy – ‘to his countless acts of generosity that were and remain hidden … Then there was his passionate devotion to the cause of refugees that the Vatican and the UN called on and that passion came from a deep religious consciousness. He promoted globalisation because he saw it was a means of lifting billions out of grim poverty and of countering a narrow nationalism, which avoids global responsibility.’ While pointing out that Sutherland’s enthusiasm for the benefits of globalisation perhaps blurred his view of its downside, he praised the contribution Sutherland had thereby made to benefiting the poorer countries of the world, and concluded:
He was a committed Catholic whose Catholicism was open, tolerant and gracious and the absence of these characteristics raised his temperature. I recall the appointment of a man to high ecclesiastical office producing language from Peter quite unsuitable to repeat in church. His convinced faith enabled him to accept without self-pity his illness, which eventually led to the enfeebled body, the weakening mind, and a total dependency on others. These are the brute facts, but we are not here to celebrate brute facts but to celebrate Peter’s life in the light of Christ’s death and resurrection. We look on the cross above this altar and we see that when Christ was at his weakest, frailest, when he was helpless and humiliated, then was he at the point of his entry into glory. So with Peter, he has moved from his frail and broken state into that place of peace and happiness that was prepared for him from before the foundation of the world.[2]